Month: April 2012

When Wayne Breitbarth talks about LinkedIn you can almost see the light bulbs going on over the heads of those in the room listening.

As the author of the best selling book on Amazon about LinkedIn, it’s clear that Breitbarth is both knowledgeable and passionate about teaching folks how they can use LinkedIn to grow their business. What gets the light bulbs going on is his ability to distill the nuances of LinkedIn success into a series of really simple suggestions that people can’t wait to try out.

His presentation Wednesday in Appleton was no exception. Almost as soon as he finished speaking to the special lunchtime edition of the New North Social Media Breakfast, one of the most common refrains from those departing was “I can’t wait to try that out.”

Breitbarth covered a lot of ground during his presentation Unlocking LinkedIn’s Corporate Marketing Potential, from new advertising tools to leveraging employee LinkedIn networks to maximizing the tools of a LinkedIn company page. But it was one of the simple lessons that really stuck – a simple lesson on the social media optimization of your personal LinkedIn profile to improve its rank in a LinkedIn search.Improving the performance of your profile in search – perhaps to the number one position – is largely dependent on four things:

Keywords – this is how people will find you. Use your industry and company keywords in your profile. “It’s still a stupid search engine,” as Breitbarth said

Story – this is what makes you interesting. Use your keywords to tell it, but make sure it is your story and tell it well

Headlines – this is the attention grabber at the top of your profile. If you don’t write it yourself, then LinkedIn just grabs your current job title. Make sure you use your most important keywords here

Titles – these are the various jobs you have held. Again, industry keywords are important

Addressing these four elements of your profile can have tremendous results. While they are interdependent, it is the keywords that drive success, much like they do for you website.So how do you know what keywords to use? Breitbarth has you covered there to. You can find them by answering 8 simple questions:

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 130 million members following over 1.9 million companies worldwide.

A LinkedIn Company Page provides an ideal platform to tell your story, engage with followers, and share career opportunities. It helps humanize your business, giving visitors a chance to learn about the people behind your organization. It also provides an efficient way to speak to millions of professionals through word-of-mouth recommendations and trusted testimonials.

Oh yeah, it also generates leads.

A Company Page gives your business an opportunity to showcase your products and services, as well as to seek out opportunities with millions of business professionals who are also consumers. With this kind of B2B and B2C reach, it’s no wonder LinkedIn dominates Twitter and Facebook for online lead generation.

In a recent study of over 5,000 businesses, inbound marketing industry leader HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate, at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).¹

Set-Up a Complete User Profile– People form connections with people, not companies. Flesh out the details of your life, such as past experience, education and skills; be sure to add yourself as an employee or member of your company.

Add your Photo– People are more likely to connect with you and your company if they can put a face to a name.

Customize your Public URL– You should edit your profile so that your LinkedIn profile URL looks like http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. To do this, click on “edit” next to your public profile URL, and then “edit” once again on your public profile settings page.

Activate Company Page Status Updates– Make sure to add yourself as admin so you’re able to edit your page and publish status updates.

Company Overview– Create a Company Overview description, adding the most important information first (the first 8 lines are visible before being truncated).

Insert Landing Page Link to Overview– Don’t miss out on an easy lead gen opportunity. Link to your website homepage, about us page, blog, or a targeted offer such as an upcoming webinar.

Add Company Specialties– Optimize your page’s internal SEO. Help people searching for companies like yours within LinkedIn find you by clarifying exactly what you do.

Link to Company Website– Leverage the vast LinkedIn community by making it easy for your target audience to find your website.

Include Products/Services– The “Products” section of a LinkedIn page provides an opportunity to link to and explain each of your products and services. Ask existing customers to “recommend” your products.

LinkedIn is the ideal tool for reaching prospects in the B2B world, finding a job, obtaining venture capital, forming business partnerships and growing your business. Make sure you’re using it the right way.

Company Pages– First thing’s first: pages should be detailed and updated often. Employees of your business should all link to you company page, as LinkedIn pulls statistics about your company from the profiles of employees. Services provided should be listed in detail. Put your logo on there and any contact information where people can get in touch. See example above.

Executive profiles– Make sure the executives in your company fill in their profiles thoroughly. Every single section needs to be filled in with detailed keywords about what it is that they do. Link back to the company page as well. Executive profiles are a great marketing tool for your company, and they can post updates to drive people back to the company page.

Uniform Profiles- Try to keep all of your employees’ profiles the same. Of course, each person is different and has different roles within the company, but make sure the verbiage about the company is uniform and profile sections are filled out in the same way throughout. A company training for LinkedIn profiles and effective use can ensure a common standard.

Groups– Have executives and other individuals in the company join groups relevant to your industry. More importantly, however, have them join groups where potential clients might be. For example, for a social media marketing agency, join social media groups, but also groups that have people that might need social media services (which could be companies in almost any industry). Individuals can then represent the company and post links about relevant topics.

Interested in finding a new job, switching careers, attracting more clients or building a stronger professional network? LinkedIn Groups is the place to be. Groups provides opportunities to meet and engage in discussions with members of your industry, your alumni community or other professional interest areas. Becoming active in LinkedIn Groups is like attending a professional conference every time you log on.

Here are five ways to get the most out of LinkedIn Groups.

1. Extend relationships with your in-person networks. The first groups to join are those you belong to offline. For instance, become a member of your university’s LinkedIn alumni group, any corporations where you’ve worked, any professional or trade associations you belong to and any non-profits where you volunteer.

Because you share a “real world” affinity with your fellow members, these are the environments where you’ll likely feel most comfortable seeking advice, connections or information. You might post a general career question, such as “Does anyone have advice on making the transition from consultant to full-time employee?” Or, you might search each group’s members for people in your desired industry to whom you can reach out and request an informational interview.

2. Be an industry insider. Next, join groups related to your industry (or the industry you want to join if you’re a recent grad or career changer). You’ll stay up to date on important industry issues, must-read articles and other hot topics.

To find the most valuable industry groups to join, be as specific as possible in your search criteria. For example, type in “social media marketing” rather than simply “marketing” if that’s your particular interest area. If your search comes back with lots of results, LinkedIn helps you filter by showing you which groups are “Very Active” (definitely where you want to be for the most potential opportunities) and which groups include members of your network (if people you admire belong to a particular group, that’s a great sign that you’ll find value there as well). Join as many industry groups as feel relevant to your interests — you can always drop out if the discussions aren’t valuable for you.

3. Lurk first. In any group, your best bet is to “lurk” first without commenting to get the lay of the land. Check out what topics receive the most comments. Look to the “Top Influencers This Week” area to see which members are driving conversation. Visit the “Manager’s Choice” discussions, where the group’s manager has elevated certain conversations that he or she feels are most important for members to view. You can also get a feel for the overall tone of each group’s discussions (Casual or buttoned-up? Highly technical? Globally or regionally focused?) before you contribute.

My husband and I have trained our three daughters on the importance of posting only appropriate information on any type of social media. This includes not posting pictures of Saturday night’s party on Facebook and not posting or Tweeting anything when they’re angry or in a bad mood. Now, managing your social media profile has become even more important – a 2012 survey demonstrates that your social media profile could make or break your chances of being hired.

According to the 2012 annual technology market survey conducted by Eurocom Worldwide, “Almost one in five technology industry executives say that a candidate’s social media profile has caused them not to hire that person.” Previous Eurocom Worldwide surveys had found almost 40% of the survey respondents from technology companies review job candidate’s profiles on social media sites.

While we’ve all heard about the increase in companies checking the social media profiles of job candidates, this survey provides the first evidence that prospective job candidates are actually being rejected because of their profiles.

Tips to build a positive social media profile and avoid being rejected by a potential employer:

LinkedIn: Create a highly professional profile by using LinkedIn as an electronic résumé. This includes writing a succinct profile summary, adding your current job information, past job experience, education, skills, awards, and even obtaining testimonials from previous managers, co-workers, or direct reports. If you author a blog that relates to business or your work, be sure to include the URL information. Same goes for Twitter, include the URL only if you use it for business, not personal reasons.

One of the common frustrations I hear from job seekers is that they claim to never be able to find the hiring managers for the positions in which they’re interested. They have a point; a hiring manager is always an in-demand person and one who rarely advertises his or her location.

There is LinkedIn, which gives you the ability to determine if you have any potential contacts within an organization. The problem is the utility of these searches are only as good as your own network. If you’re just starting out on the networking path, it will take some time to build up enough connections to reach the saturation point. Of course there are also regular search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, which have Web reach as wide as a country mile, but usually only get you an inch deep into a company’s executive staff list.

But how about combining the power of both tools?

In his recent book, The Panic Free Job Search, career management expert Paul Hill talks about how those who are new to networking can get a leg up by using the power of search engines to tap into the farther reaches of LinkedIn that may not be accessible to the novice networker.

The true benefits of LinkedIn’s searchability are hidden behind a paywall, or premium account, Hill explains. With these premium accounts, searches within LinkedIn for companies, contacts or job titles can yield up to 700 results. Those who do not have a premium account, however, are limited to just 100 results for each search within LinkedIn’s site.

But for many job seekers on a budget who can’t afford the $40 to $75 per month for a business-level or executive LinkedIn account, Hill has found an easy work-around to access the deeper recesses of LinkedIn. Simply use Google, or any other major search engine, to perform an “inurl” search using LinkedIn and various keywords in your searches. By “X-raying” the LinkedIn site with a Google search, Hill says, one can circumvent the need for a premium account to get access to more companies that might be hiring.